The Legitimization of the Movies: Stanley Cavell on the Classical Hollywood Cinema

The Japanese Society for Aesthetics Aesthetics No.19 (2015): 65-77 The Legitimization of Movies: Stanley Cavell on the Classical Hollywood Cinema KIHARA Keisho The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University, Tokyo Introduction For American philosopher Stanley Cavell (1926- ), when it comes to considering “reflections on the ontology of film,” he has always looked to the classical Hollywood cinema from 1930 to 1940 as his subject of analysis. This is evident in all of his major publications; The World Viewed (1971), Pursuits of Happiness (1981), and Contesting Tears (1996), which deal with the classical Hollywood cinema from the period. Although Cavell has done some analysis of French films (Renoir, Truffaut, Godard et al.), he has continually discussed them in relation to Hollywood. Here we can find some unity in Cavell’s writings, as Stephen Mulhall argues Cavell’s work on cinema is divided into two parts, that is analyses of specific films, and examinations of the medium of cinema itself. According to Mulhall, Cavell’s work nevertheless possesses a real unity. “[I]n part, this is because he finds that the films he studies themselves study their relation to their medium and its audience, but it is also because his work focusses upon precisely the same issue at both levels—that of scepticism” (Mulhall 223). The positions of The World Viewed as a “theoretical base” which reflects on the nature of cinema in fundamental ways, and Pursuits of Happiness and Contesting Tears as texts on “genre studies” consisting of analyses of individual films, seem to be generally accepted. However, does Cavell’s philosophy of film surely constitute a real unity of theoretical base and practical criticism? The aim of this paper is to discuss the decisive change in Cavell’s attitude towards the classical Hollywood cinema between The World Viewed and Pursuits of Happiness. The sign of the coming change can be seen in the latter half of the chronologically ordered The World Viewed, or more precisely, from his analysis of the films known as New Hollywood and Nouvelle Vague. In his analysis of these “modern cinemas” he acquired a new method and then applied this method to the classical Hollywood cinema retroactively in his later books. Although Cavell previously considered that the avoidance of modernism was what characterized the classical Hollywood cinema despite it being a product of modernity, he changed to the position of acknowledging that cinema is, and always has been, a condition of modernism along with the other arts. John Mullarkey has already pointed out the amendment of Cavell’s position itself (Mullarkey 120), but we need to investigate its significance in more detail. For it is a decisive conversion for Cavell’s study of film. More importantly, in acknowledging that cinema is a condition of modernism, he thought that it could be legitimized as art. This conversion, on the one hand, encouraged development of not only his film philosophy but also academic film studies as a discipline. On the other hand, he also abandoned his assumption that cinema is a worthwhile art form for analysing mass culture. In the following, firstly, I will investigate Cavell’s 66 KIHARA Keisho earlier film philosophy regarding his analysis of classical Hollywood films. Secondly, I will discuss the period of modern cinema in The World Viewed. And finally, I will review Cavell’s later period, that is, his analysis of classical Hollywood films as modernism, especially concerning the analysis of The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940) in Pursuits of Happiness. [1] 1. The Classical Hollywood Cinema as Mass Culture One of the most significant concepts in Cavell’s film philosophy is arguably that of automatism. First of all, it indicates the mechanical quality of cinema that originates from the camera; yet, at the same time it also means “convention” which often signifies the concept of “genre” typical to Hollywood cinema. Although the concept is often unclear, the two meanings are basically regarded as the underlying principles of automatism. However, it is only in The World Viewed that we can see Cavell use the term automatism quite frequently. The fact that it rarely appears in his later books on film clearly indicates his change in approach to cinema. Therefore, to begin with, we need an investigation of the content of The World Viewed in which he analyses the classical Hollywood cinema in terms of this concept of automatism. [2] As previously stated, Cavell consistently reflects on the classical Hollywood cinema in his books on film, and the underlying theme of The World Viewed is that of how we should understand cinema as mass culture. In other words, how the classical Hollywood cinema could have avoided modernism? For Cavell, modernism is a condition that means each medium is conscious of its own characteristics. Despite the fact that other arts evolved into a state of modernism in twentieth century, cinema, as he argued in The World Viewed, remained traditional without questioning the nature of its own medium, thus continuing as popular culture. Yet if art includes cinema, the concept of art must be transformed, or as Cavell states, “[i]f film is seriously to be thought of as an art at all, then it needs to be explained how it can have avoided the fate of modernism” (WV 14). In addition to this, Cavell raised the essential question of why film undoubtedly has artistic value despite that it might not be considered as art. Or that is to say, why are films so interesting? Moreover, why is it that not only film masterpieces but also “ordinary films” are worthy of academic investigation? It is exactly this mysterious mode of cinema that has intrigued Cavell and he states in chapter one of The World Viewed: [T]he more we learn (from the Hollywood memoirs of Ben Hecht, say) of the corruptions and stupidities in the industry that formed to produce those objects, the more we are likely to wonder how the films we care about can ever have been made. This is not a problem if the only films you care about are carefully chosen masterpieces: few regimes are so perfectly terrible and efficient that they prevent every drop of originality from leaking through their clutches. But if one’s range of care is wider, then how is one to explain the effect of those ordinary instances, which seem just to have been made for the industry to make? What is the power of film that it could survive (even profit artistically from) so much neglect and ignorant contempt by those in power over it? What is film? (WV 15, my emphasis) The Legitimization of Movies 67 From the above we can see that cinema has become a critical philosophical problem for Cavell due to the fact that not only are there masterpieces that align with the other arts, but a number of “ordinary instances” that are just as valuable. We might assume that Cavell was sympathetic to the idea of film as a “culture industry” which Adorno and Horkheimer despised in The Dialectic of Enlightenment; however, he could not help but concede the artistic value of “the products” coming out of the studio system. The critical question of Cavell’s “What is film?” uses André Bazin’s argument of the ontology of the photographic image as his point of departure in The World Viewed, considering the characteristics of cinema that make it different from other arts such as the mechanical quality, or automatism, as Cavell puts it (WV 16-25). In addition, Cavell also raised the question of how did cinema acquire artistic qualities so easily, and he suggests this was due to the mechanical property of the medium. He cited James Agee, who for Cavell was the most distinguished critic that properly understood the automatic nature of cinema. In The World Viewed, Cavell referred to Agee’s criticism and praised “[h]is gift for finding and describing something to like, in no matter of what yards of junk” (WV 7, author’s emphasis). He later acknowledged Agee again bearing in mind the power of the camera; “the objects it manufactures have for us the same natural interest, of fascination, or boredom, or nothing, or poignance, terror, as the world itself” (WV 104). It is no coincidence that Agee was referred to above in the chapter on automatism with Cavell arguing that Agee’s criticism is not just outstanding, but also contains a full understanding of the automatic nature of cinema. The World Viewed might be sometimes considered as abstract or too theoretical, and that it lacks a close analysis of individual films due to the argument being centred on the mechanical quality of cinema. However, according to Cavell, unlike other arts, cinema cannot be understood by analysing individual films. Following Cavell’s argument, we must grasp it as a kind of mass, because, as he states, “[t]he impact of movies is too massive, too out of proportion with the individual worth of ordinary movies” (WV 154, my emphasis). In chapter one of The World Viewed, for instance, Cavell enumerates monotonously about thirty classical Hollywood films that he watched when he was younger (WV 10). Yet this does not merely present his nostalgia for his youth or give credit to his cinephiliac knowledge. This style of writing is Cavell’s unique rhetoric that clearly shows that classical Hollywood films must be recognized as not individual films but as a whole unity. [3] Thus Cavell’s argument inevitably led to genre theory. Cavell considered the concept of automatism to contain also the concept of genre, the studio system and tradition of classical Hollywood.

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